Title
Robots Building Bridges, Not Walls
Abstract
The TERMES system is a robot collective capable of constructing 2.5D user-specified structures with specialized bricks. This work extends the original system, by enabling 3D construction without added complexity in the robots. To do this, we introduce an expandable brick which complies with the original TERMES hardware and is inexpensive and fast to fabricate. We further show a decentralized algorithm that permits an arbitrary number of robots to use both original and expandable bricks to build structures with overhangs over convex cavities, i.e. with bridges and roofs. Finally, we discuss a mechanical redesign of the robots towards decreased system cost, fabrication and maintenance time. Although more work is needed to realize construction of large-scale overhangs in practice, our work represents an important step towards construction of complex structures by minimalistic and scalable robot collectives.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/FAS-W.2018.00041
2018 IEEE 3rd International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W)
Keywords
Field
DocType
robot collectives,automated construction,embodied intelligence,swarm intelligence
Computer science,Swarm intelligence,Regular polygon,Brick,Robot,Distributed computing,Scalability
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-5176-6
0
0.34
References 
Authors
9
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yiwen Hua101.01
Yawen Deng201.01
Kirstin Petersen364.94